A New Generation of Mindset Science, Made Actionable.
In the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, on the traditional Country of the Bunurong people, researcher and teacher Ash Buchanan leads a global initiative to study the mindset field as a whole. His work brings together the field’s collective knowledge and explores how it can be applied in the real world, helping people and teams develop impactful mindset skills.
Ash’s journey began with a surprising realisation: despite the massive popularity of mindset, its scientific foundation did not yet appear to have been studied as a whole. This insight inspired a decade-long research program to study more than 40 theories, 100 definitions, and 1,800 types, bringing them together into a field map and field guide. In the process, Ash uncovered a hidden history of mindset reaching back to 1909, alongside deeper connections with lineages including mindfulness, Indigenous knowledge systems, and worldviews.
By listening closely to what the field has collectively learned, Ash developed 16 New and Ancient Science Mindset Principles. He has authored five books, including the #1 Amazon bestsellers: Mindset Aware, The Nature of Mindset, and Handbook of Mindset Research. His scholarly work includes Third Wave of Mindset Theory, Perspectives: The History of Mindset, and An Ecology of Mindset. Ash’s research has featured in the International Journal of Wellbeing, Psychology Today, Springer Nature, Forbes, and Edutopia.
As the founder of Cohere, Ash helps people access and contribute to the collective knowing of the mindset field, so they can develop new generation mindset skills that can transform how they learn, lead, and work. To support this, he has developed a range of new practices. This includes Mindset Literacy: the ability to notice, name, and work with the mindsets that shape how people see, think, and act. And, Mindset-Aware Leadership: the capacity to lead with an awareness of the mindsets involved in a situation. More broadly, his work sits at the intersection of wellbeing, embodiment practice, regenerative development, lived experience, systems change, transformative learning, power-literacy, and community-led action.
Alongside this work, Ash leads a regenerative wellbeing initiative called benefit mindset. He holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) and a Bachelor of Engineering and Science, both from the University of Melbourne, and was a member of the university’s Thrive Research Hub and a Fellow at the Centre for Sustainability Leadership.
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Your Guide to the Mindset Sciences
From Mindset Aware by Ash Buchanan
Hi! My name is Ash, and I will be your guide for the learning journey that lies ahead. I was born in Australia and at the time of writing this book, I am living on the traditional Country of the Bunurong people and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, which is known today as Melbourne.
I come from a family with Ukrainian heritage and a tradition of resilience. My grandparents migrated to Australia as displaced people at the end of World War II after living through a famine (called Holodomor) that was forced upon them by the Soviet Union. To survive these oppressive experiences, my grandparents taught themselves the practice of permaculture, and they brought this practice with them to Australia. As a child, some of my fondest memories are of playing in my grandparent’s veggie garden, as my grandpa and grandma worked the soil. Now that I’ve grown older, I have become deeply interested in how I can continue this family tradition of resilience by cultivating a soil of a different kind. What I’ve become deeply interested in is how groups of people can work together to cultivate their social soil, or social field, and create the conditions for wellbeing for all and transformative change. This interest led me to study regenerative and restorative practice, and I also founded a consultancy called Cohere to help actualise this work in the world.
My journey to becoming a mindset scholar and practitioner began in 2014, while I was studying psychology at university. I was deeply curious about the psychology of how people and systems change, and a word that kept on popping up in my research was mindset. I didn’t know much about mindset at the time, so I decided to focus my studies and training in this area.
While at university, I was introduced to a body of work called fixed and growth mindset theory. The way this theory was presented to me was that it was the legitimate foundation for work within the mindset field. I wanted to be a good psychology student who was engaging in sound scientific practices, so I decided to study this theory in depth. When it came to developing my own body of work, I included fixed and growth mindset theory as the basis for proposing benefit mindset theory, which is a compassionate and transformative evolution for supporting systems change and wellbeing for all.
As I began to experiment with these theories more widely, I thought I had a sound scientific foundation in the psychology of mindset. However, it wasn’t long before I started to notice gaps appearing in the theories and research I had both studied and developed. I also started having experiences alongside other practitioners where I was beginning to realise that the psychology of mindset was much broader and more diverse than I currently understood. All of a sudden, the scientific foundation I was standing on that I thought was sound and strong, was quickly becoming shaky and was beginning to crumble beneath my feet.
While I have great respect for the growth and fixed mindset tradition of research, what I was beginning to realise was that this tradition did not appear to study all of the mindset sciences in their totality, and offer a comprehensive theory that was based on all the evidence. This meant by focusing my studies on this tradition of research, and not on the findings from the broader mindset sciences, my understanding was incomplete. What felt important for my integrity as a mindset researcher and practitioner was to study as many perspectives as I could, including all of the best and brightest ideas from all the mindset sciences, so that I had the most complete and rigorous understanding possible.
I figured surely someone in the mindset field had already undertaken a detailed systematic review of all the science, and shared an evidence-based theory. But to my surprise, such a systematic review did not seem to exist. Despite mindset being such a popular and fundamental topic, it did not appear anyone had studied the mindset sciences in their totality and offered a comprehensive perspective.
This observation stunned me. How could something so fundamental to human psychology lack a comprehensive, evidence-based theory? I double-checked my findings and confirmed: this was indeed a major gap in the mindset sciences that was hiding in plain sight. While this gap wasn’t an ideal situation for the mindset sciences, I realised it was an exciting opportunity to engage in some transformative research. I could help to address this gap by working towards a comprehensive approach to mindset that was based on all the evidence.
So, I began the process of moving through a second mindset education that was far more expansive than my first. This time, I approached mindset from three different angles at once. I went wide by studying hundreds of theories and definitions across multiple disciplines and diverse ways of knowing. This included studying perspectives coming from Western, Eastern, indigenous, and wisdom traditions using a regenerative research methodology. I went deep by engaging in my own self-guided experiential inquiry in both daily life and contemplative settings. This included going on mindfulness and yoga retreats, as well as collating self-observations during life challenges and opportunities. I went practical by working directly with schools and organisations who genuinely wanted to know and shift their mindset. This included hosting mindset awareness circles and facilitating collective leadership journeys.
What happened was that through this process of engaging in a second mindset education, I experienced a profound transformation of view, that some practitioners in the field refer to as a “mindset shift” or a “paradigm shift” in my very way of understanding the psychology of mindset. I was now able to see the psychology of mindset through many different eyes, and more of the collective wisdom of the mindset field was beginning to reveal itself to me.
Nowadays, much of my work focuses on how we as people can raise our awareness of the collective wisdom of the mindset field, so we can understand our mindsets more deeply, and we can actively participate in the evolution of what is possible.